Sunday, 21 February 2010

As it's kinda Antiques Roadshow time, take a look at this artwork which is housed in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery.

Painted in 1845, it portrays Russian schoolkids (ten years old, maybe?) pensively solving a maths puzzle written on the blackboard by their teacher. No calculators, no pencil and paper, but they look eager to try. Confident, even.

The sum in question is below.

Reckon kids of that age in our much-vaunted state system could perform mental gymnastics such as this?

If you do it in sequence, the first three sums = 365, so the answer's always going to be two. You do the fourth and fifth independently to verify it. Still bloody hard to do in your head though, and not a million miles away from stuff we were taught at my grammar school at a similar age. These days they do some maths at A level that we did at the age of twelve. I'm 50.

I found the easiest way was to add 10x10 to 10x11 to 10x12 etc, then add on the missing 11, 12s, 13s etc. Less numbers to hold in your head at one time. Could probably have done it at ten, but I'm a similar age to PW above (and had a very good primary school teacher).

While this may be true, one must remember that in 1845 these poor children missed out on learning the truth about manmade-global-warming-danger, second-hand-smoke-harm, third-hand-smoke, the danger of not recycling properly, pagan theology, the goodness of voting Labour, why MPs are expense privileged, how propaganda requires coordination, the need for a centralized Europe, why a single world-government works best, why CCTVs are useful, why there should be a law against and a ban on any sort of human activity imagineable involving personal choice - the list could go on - but my point is, clearly, while learning how to think logically and independently, to desire freedom, truth and justice, learn solid math, reading, grammar and writing skills - they clearly missed out on the more important matters - like our children today are privileged to enjoy - in lieu of the other, which is no longer valued.

What a strange time that must have been. Why some of them probably even went so far as living very long lives and not realizing that by smoking, drinking and eating as they please they were really miserable after all - unlike ourselves, who are nowadays better educated and enjoying great prosperity, freedom and happiness, as a result of our most progressive modern school system.

As someone who left school less than half a decade ago I'd like to point out that I managed this one without needing pen+paper, let alone a calculator.

Maybe it's just that all the way through (including during) GCSE's I had at least one maths lesson a week that was purely metal arithmetic - sums like this were common place, as was calculus and advanced algebra.

We weren't allowed to use calculators until the very last term before the exams, and I still managed over 90%.

Then again I wasn't in this country for my education, and my parents had to pay for it.

Sorry, sorry - but couldn't be arsed to try without pen & paper as err.. I'm not 10 anymore and a lot more fucking lazy. Still, kudos to those who did and bravo for the thread and cheering me up that it ain't the kids who are dumb but the fucking useless teachers.